Exploiting Orlando
I wasn’t going to post anything like this until tomorrow, but the sickening quality of the post-Orlando reaction is simply overwhelming, and is a story in and of itself:
What has happened in Orlando is just the beginning. Our leadership is weak and ineffective. I called it and asked for the ban. Must be tough
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 12, 2016
Omar Mateen was born in America. He is an American. This is scapegoating.
Hillary found her own customary scapegoat, which Charles C.W. Cooke called her out on:
He passed a background check. Twice. What’s your plan? https://t.co/8NzJxSY5Nl
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) June 12, 2016
President Obama put his own political spin on the massacre. From John Podhoretz’s column:
Omar Mateen called the cops to pledge his fealty to ISIS as he was carrying out his mass murderer in Orlando early Sunday morning. Twelve hours later, the president of the United States declared that “we have no definitive assessment on the motivation” of Omar Mateen but that “we know he was a person filled with hate.” So I guess the president thinks Mateen didn’t mean it? Here again, and horribly, we have an unmistakable indication that Obama finds it astonishingly easy to divorce himself from a reality he doesn’t like — the reality of the Islamist terror war against the United States and how it is moving to our shores in the form of lone-wolf attacks.
More:
So determined is the president to avoid the subject of Islamist, ISIS-inspired or ISIS-directed terrorism that he concluded his remarks with an astonishing insistence that “we need the strength and courage to change” our attitudes toward the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community. That’s just disgusting. There’s no other word for it. America’s national attitude toward LGBT people didn’t shoot up the Pulse nightclub. This country’s national attitude has undergone a sea-change in the past 20 years, by the way, in case the president hasn’t noticed.
Despite the inconvenient facts that the mass killer was a Muslim Democrat who pledged allegiance to ISIS, a transgendered ACLU staff lawyer reminds his flock who the REAL enemy is — conservative Christians and Republicans:
I don’t care who shooter claimed allegiance to. We don’t have to look beyond the hateful culture right here to understand how this happened
— Chase Strangio (@chasestrangio) June 12, 2016
Jeffrey Goldberg, bless him, makes an obvious point that’s astonishingly not obvious to very many people:
This needs to be reiterated: Orlando massacre can be about Islamism, access to guns, homophobia and mental illness, all at the same time.
— (((Goldberg))) (@JeffreyGoldberg) June 12, 2016
I expect the emerging story from the Left will be it’s all the fault of conservative Christians and the NRA, because the Left will not be able to bear the tension between two of its favorite causes: fighting “homophobia” and fighting “Islamophobia.”
From the Right the story will be, “Muslims! It’s the Muslims!” And they will have something of a point, especially as things like this come out, via Florida Today. According to a former co-worker of Mateen’s:
Gilroy, a former Fort Pierce police officer, said Mateen frequently made homophobic and racial comments. Gilroy said he complained to his employer several times but it did nothing because he was Muslim. Gilroy quit after he said Mateen began stalking him via multiple text messages — 20 or 30 a day. He also sent Gilroy 13 to 15 phone messages a day, he said.
“I quit because everything he said was toxic,” Gilroy said Sunday, “and the company wouldn’t do anything. This guy was unhinged and unstable. He talked of killing people.”
If it is true that the employers would not take action against Mateen because they feared being called Islamophobic, then that is damning — to them and their judgment. It reveals the peril of political correctness.
But here’s the thing: there will never be a way to stop lone wolves like Mateen. Blaming all the Muslims in America for this atrocity is unjust and dangerous. I don’t know that anybody in this country, left or right, has the ability to restrain themselves.
You probably have your own fears, but I believe that some on the Left will use this as a kind of Reichstag fire, to justify further cracking down on free speech, and demonizing Christians. I hope I’m wrong. I don’t think I will be.
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